For Reid, No Shaking Tea Party Challenger

Opposing views on the candidates for Senate in Nevada were on display Tuesday in Las Vegas.Credit
Julie Jacobson/Associated Press

LAS VEGAS — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada first thought he could scrape his way to re-election by invoking his power as majority leader and reminding voters what that means for his home state. When that didn’t seem to work, he thought he could pull out this election with a scorched-earth campaign aimed at his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, a Tea Party candidate with a rich history of unorthodox statements and politically unpopular positions.

“Sharron Angle: ideas so extreme they are dangerous,” an announcer says in a ubiquitous new Reid television advertisement that focuses on Ms. Angle’s vote in the State Assembly against legislation requiring checks on volunteers working with schoolchildren. Former President Bill Clinton, appearing with Mr. Reid at a high school Tuesday night, said, “For the future of Nevada, for the jobs you so desperately need, it would be unbelievably negligent to say, ‘I know you’re right, but I’m just too mad, I’ve got to vote for this woman.’ ”

But as two new polls this week showed the candidates effectively tied yet again, it appears increasingly likely that Mr. Reid’s fortunes may ultimately turn on the weapon he has long boasted of: a sophisticated voter turnout operation that he has methodically built since President Obama ran in Nevada two years ago.

On the eve of the only debate of this contest, and as early voting begins on Saturday — a two-week period in which 50 percent of Nevadans are expected to cast ballots — Mr. Reid finds himself trapped in the race he has, in many ways, always feared. Ms. Angle, an opponent his campaign had viewed as the most flawed on the Republican bench, has not only held her own, but has become a national symbol of the Tea Party attempt to upend politics in Washington.

The Angle campaign reported this week that it had raised $14.3 million in the third quarter of this year, bringing her fund-raising total to about $17.8 million. Mr. Reid has not yet reported his take, but his aides made clear that despite extensive efforts, he would fall well short of Ms. Angle’s haul. Going into the third quarter, he had raised about $19.2 million.

On top of the money contributed directly to Ms. Angle, independent groups supporting her spent at least $2.5 million between early July and early October, according to the media monitoring service CMAG. Groups supporting Mr. Reid spent about $3.2 million during the same period. What that all means is that Ms. Angle — who Mr. Reid had once assumed would be at a significant financial disadvantage to him, given his fund-raising prowess as majority leader — may have at the very least nearly erased his financial advantage.

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The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid.Credit
Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

Underscoring just how much this race has become a proxy for both sides nationally, records analyzed by CQ Moneyline show that 80 percent of the money donated to both campaigns has come from outside of Nevada, a near mirror image of the other major Senate races.

Mr. Reid has been advertising on local airwaves without stop since last November, and has trotted out a series of big-name endorsements from Republicans in recent weeks. Yet public polls continue to show that he has the support of fewer than 50 percent of the electorate. This reflects the fact that Nevada has one of the worst economies in the country and shows the price Mr. Reid has paid with this state’s independent voters for being seen as the partisan majority leader and champion of Mr. Obama’s policies.

Neither Mr. Reid nor Ms. Angle “has been able to break out,” said David F. Damore, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada. “I think by now Reid had hoped to have some distance.”

For all the money gushing through the state, aides to both candidates described the central question of the race in similar terms: whether the intensity of Ms. Angle’s supporters, and their dislike of Mr. Reid — a statement from Ms. Angle’s campaign boasting of the fund-raising take talked about the “the hatred of Harry Reid” — would be enough to overcome the incumbent’s get-out-the-vote operation

Campaigns frequently put too much faith in voter turnout operations, either to calm nervous supporters or boost their prospects with the media. But in a race this close — and with an electorate this small — turnout could very well prove critical, particularly with a field of a half-dozen other candidates and an option to vote for “none of the above,” which means that a candidate can win with less than 50 percent of the vote. In this case, there is also an official Tea Party candidate on the ballot.

“I’m very confident that we are running ahead,” said Mr. Reid’s pollster, Mark Mellman. “It’s a tough race, it’s a competitive race and lots of things can happen between now and Election Day. But we’ve been meaningfully ahead, pretty consistently”

Mr. Reid has a long history as a tough campaigner. His political strategist, Jim Margolis, signaling the weeks ahead, repeatedly used the words “extreme” and “crazy” to describe Ms. Angle. “She has a rigid worldview, cloaked in a smile, that borders on crazy,” he said. “That’s Sharron Angle.”

Ms. Angle, asked about Mr. Reid’s campaign on Thursday after attending a private question-and-answer session — nearly all of Ms. Angle’s campaign events are closed to the press — smiled and responded: “The best that I could give you is that the message has changed from hope and change to fear and smear.”

Since Ms. Angle defeated a field of better-known mainstream candidates in the Republican primary, the two campaigns and outside groups have spent at least $15.5 million on television commercials, a huge amount given the cost of TV time in Nevada.

Mr. Reid has received support from the nation’s largest unions as well as Nevada-based industries whose interests he has fiercely — and sometimes to criticism — advocated over the years: particularly mining and gambling. Harrah’s, Newmont U.S.A. Ltd. mining and the Service Employees International Union, among others, have pumped millions into an outside group called Patriot Majority, in what has amounted to the largest independent effort on behalf of a Democrat in the nation.

The group has gone so far as to run a radio advertisement promoting the upstart Senate candidacy of Scott Ashjian, who has positioned himself as a spoiler to Ms. Angle — the overwhelming favorite of local Tea Party activists — by running on a party line he helped start called Tea Party of Nevada.

Ms. Angle has had help, too. The Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads sister groups — started with aid from Karl Rove, the chief strategist for former President George W. Bush, and financed in part by former patrons of Mr. Bush from the oil and gas and financial industries — have spent more than $2 million to topple Mr. Reid, according to CMAG. The Club for Growth and a newer group, Americans for New Leadership, have also come to Ms. Angle’s aide.

Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling, said Mr. Reid’s biggest challenge has been to get voters to view this — as Mr. Clinton said the other night — as a choice between two candidates, rather than a judgment on Mr. Reid.

“My sense all along is at the end of the day this is a referendum on Reid,” Mr. Coker said. “No matter how kooky they try to portray Angle, I think at the end of the day, people, if they have to make a choice between the lesser of two evils, they’ll vote against Harry Reid.”

Adam Nagourney reported from Las Vegas, and Jim Rutenberg from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2010, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: For Reid, No Shaking Tea Party Challenger. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe